When comparing LÖVE vs Irrlicht, the Slant community recommends LÖVE for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?”LÖVE is ranked 2nd while Irrlicht is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose LÖVE is:

The [LÖVE forums][1] are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board.
If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful [IRC channel][2].
[1]: https://www.love2d.org/forums/
[2]: http://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=love

Pros

Pro

Active and very friendly community

The LÖVE forums are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board.

If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful IRC channel.

Pro

Uses the fantastic Lua for scripting

Lua is an embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games.

Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself.

Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax.

Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license).

Pro

Cross-platform

Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.

Pro

Open source and free

The LÖVE engine is licensed under The zlib/libpng License (which is very short and human readable) which allows you to use the source code and even modify it as long as you do not claim that the original source code is yours.

You can obtain the code at this bitbucket repository and even help fix bugs and participate in the development of LÖVE.

Pro

Easy to understand and use

Lua2D handles loading the resources, reading input, playing sounds and displaying stuff on the screen. Only the logic is left for the developer to write. It also removes the overhead of having to use and learn a GUI game editor. All you need is a knowledge of Lua and your favourite text editor or IDE.

Pro

Great for prototyping

You can learn the basics very quickly and start making simple games in no time, even if you have no previous Lua knowledge. If you're a little experienced with LÖVE, you can prototype a 2D game with it in no time.

Pro

Very good for education

That is a great tool for teaching novice programmers. Creating a game on LÖVE, you have to think about developing, not about the syntax of the language.

Pro

Very good documentation

The LÖVE wiki provides full documentation of its easy to use Modules, which are conveniently located on the side bar of the wiki. It only takes seconds to find the module for love.keyboard, which provided a list of all functions along with arguments and examples where the function could be used.

Pro

Many examples and libraries with source code

There are plenty of open source examples of games or components built by the community that are ready to use or learn from.

Pro

Can develop within Android

It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch.

Pro

Cute name

So much love.

Pro

C++ and Lua one of the best languages for gamedev

Because all professionals in gamedev use C++, and Lua the fastest scripting lang.

Pro

Lots of examples and docs

Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets.

Pro

Free and open source

Pro

Good polymorphic design

If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking.

Pro

Lightweight

Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.

Pro

Easy to entry level C++ experience

If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time.

Pro

Support for multiple formats

This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.

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Cons

Con

Not very powerful

The engine has very few modules and only the really required one, you'll have to do almost everything from scratch.

Con

Uses hg to version-control, not git

If the source codes were controlled by git, it would be more convenient for more programmers to contribute to Love2d.Using hg on bitbucket resulted in loss of tons of users.

Con

The community seems juvenile

For example, some of the library include names such as HUMP, LUBE, AnAL.

Con

Documentation is very dry and technical

The site has plenty of tutorials, true, but they all read very technical, and explain very little. This might be too much for beginners, even for coding purposes, because of the fact that the specifics aren't explained well enough to learn effectively. The docs can be found frustrating to understand even the basics, such as tables or the like, because of how poorly they are explained, and how few examples are given before expecting you to be able to use them.

Con

Absolutely no GUI (no graphical interface)

This has no graphical interface at all, you have to know how to read script in order to know what you're looking at. After you've written the script for everything, you compile it to see the result. It's a very poor way to create a game, given how even most professional tools out there give you a GUI to work with and debug on the go. The lack of a GUI slows down the work by ten-fold, and it's just an inefficient use of your time.

Con

Not a game engine

This is a 3D graphics engine similar to Ogre3D. Thus, it doesn't provide any pathfinding or physics support. Support for those will have to be added by the dev.

Con

Outdated

Obsolete over 5 years ago. While the engine is being worked on with plans for new features and support, the movement is slow, leaving many engines far more advanced in certain areas.

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